The Cookbook Collector (3 page)

“Yes, Jessamine?”

“I was wondering something.”

“Does it have to do with money?”

His directness startled her. “My sister’s company is going public, and I can buy one hundred shares at eighteen dollars each, so I need eighteen hundred dollars.” Jess said it all in a rush. “I was wondering if you could kind of give me my future paychecks in advance. And then I’d pay you back.”

“Do I know you’d still be working for me?”

Jess nodded solemnly.

“Really? Then you’d be my longest-lasting employee.”

“Oh, I could pay you back right away because the shares are going way up.”

“What’s the company?”

“It’s Veritech.”

“Veritech! That’s your sister?”

“Yeah, she’s the CEO.”

“She could just give you the money herself.”

“She wants me to stop thinking like a student.”

He suppressed a smile and said nothing.

“So will you?”

“No,” George said slowly. “I think your parents would be a better bet.”

She shook her head.

“Well, you don’t want to ask, but they’re the ones to do it.”

“Eighteen hundred is less than the complete Ruskin,” Jess blurted out. “You want two thousand for that.”

“The Ruskin is thirty-seven volumes in morocco,” George said.

“So?”

“Just ask your mom and dad.” She frowned.

“Here, I’ll show you.” George unlocked his glass-fronted bookcase and took down the first volume and handed it to her.

Her fingers couldn’t help caressing the red leather, as he knew they would. Unconsciously, she lifted the book to her face and brushed it against her cheek.

“Ruskin’s worth two thousand, don’t you think?”

“No,” said Jess. “I don’t like him,” and she returned the book.

“I think I’m going to make Yorick’s by appointment only,” George told his friend Nick Eberhart that Sunday at Nick’s house, a Craftsman Style extravaganza. Nick was younger than George, and taller. When he started to lose his hair he had shaved his head so that he had a sleek and streamlined look. He had left Microsoft some years after George and amused himself with designing and selling screen savers: fish that appeared to swim across the computer monitor, shooting stars, flying toasters with tiny wings. After the flying toasters became the subject of a contentious lawsuit with another screen-saver company, Nick gave up the business and began dabbling as a private investor. He built his house a few blocks away from George’s place and became a model citizen, serving on the neighborhood council. A couple of times a week, he and George went running in Tilden Park.

“It’s cute the way you call it running,” said Nick’s wife, Julia, and she laughed as she went searching for Nick’s knee braces. Julia was a curiosity to George. Ten years younger than Nick, she was blond, athletic, green-eyed. A Jewish girl from Malibu.

George remembered the housewives of his youth. His own mother, Shirley, for example. She and her friends had raised the children and looked after their husbands. They’d volunteered in the schools, maintained the social fabric of the neighborhood. Remembered birthdays, planned parties, kept track of what belonged to whom and who belonged to which. Long before George heard of feminism, his mother had taught him the plight of women. Shirley had been unusually direct, Midwestern.

“I have bad news.” George remembered his mother’s matter-of-fact voice as he sat with his sister at the kitchen table after school. He was eight, his sister, Susan, six. “Robbie’s mother is in the hospital.”

“Why?” Susan asked, while George remembered that Robbie had not come to school that day.

“Well, she collapsed.”

“Doing what?” George asked.

“Doing everything.” Shirley poured the children cups of milk.

“But how did she collapse?” asked George.

“She got depressed.”

“Why?”

Susan didn’t understand; she was too young, but what Shirley said next shocked George more than anything he’d heard in his whole childhood—far more than his father’s so-called facts of life. “The truth is, it’s exhausting to take care of other people.”

He thought he was dreaming in the yellow kitchen. The floor shifted under his feet. That was how it felt to suspect for the first time that
he
might be other people.

But there was Julia, returning triumphant with the black knee braces, and kissing Nick good-bye. She did not look depressed at all, this latter-day housewife with the MBA and the beautiful two-year-old son, Henry.

As Nick drove up Wildcat Canyon Road, George said, “The problem with a brick-and-mortar store is dealing with people all the time.”

Nick glanced at George as he powered up the hill in his SUV. “I thought that was the
point
of the store.”

“I don’t really like people,” said George. “I think I’d rather just work as a private dealer and have done with it. If I could get decent help, it would be different.”

“The new one quit on you?”

“I’m sure she will. They don’t even give notice; they just leave. It’s tedious. I’m tired of it.”

“You get tired easily,” Nick pointed out.

“No, I don’t.” Nick missed the point. George didn’t tire, he was constantly disappointed. Dissatisfied. He was always looking for the next thing. He had the mind of a researcher, restlessly turning corners, seeking out new questions. But he was not a researcher; he was simply rich.

Nick parked at Inspiration Point with its view of hills and reservoirs like winding rivers far below.

“I don’t like kids,” George grumbled.

“You’re great with kids,” Nick countered with a new father’s evangelism. “Henry loves you.”

“No, I mean the kids who work for me. I don’t like dealing with them. I’m supposed to be, you know, employer, confessor, personal banker. It’s ridiculous. And they’re so ignorant. God.”

“You’re talking about the new one.” A little of the old Nick came through here, a smile, as if to say, You bring her up a lot, when of course George had only mentioned Jess once, or possibly twice, in passing.

“All of them,” he said doggedly, and Nick knew, even as they walked up to the trailhead and stretched and started jogging up the Ridge Trail with its canyon views, that George was in one of his apocalyptic moods, half bemused, half horrified. Pedantic. Of course Nick had heard George fume before about the end of Western Civilization, the death of books, the literary tradition either forgotten or maligned. Unfortunately, George didn’t quietly despair about these matters; he wrote letters on the subject and served on the board of something called the Seneca Foundation that opposed bilingual education in the schools. George was always reading, not just voraciously, but systematically, the way scientists read, the way technocrats read when they decide to take a position on Western Civilization. Plato first, then Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas—chronologically, George had built his portfolio of great books. Years ago, he’d read Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Thomas Pynchon. Now he pored over Dante and Herodotus. He’d become one of those people who felt he had to defend Shakespeare. He had not aged gracefully. “They’re all ignorant,” George said. “The new one actually reads, but only to pass judgment. This is the way kids learn today. Someone told them how you feel is more important than what you know, and so they think accusations are ideas. This is political correctness run amok.”

Nick picked up the pace, hoping to outrun George’s rant. He passed a man walking a brown and white beagle, and an elderly couple in straw hats.

“What was it Jess said today …?” George panted, trying to keep up. “Ruskin is a dogmatic, self-indulgent, sexually repressed misogynist with an edifice complex.”

Nick smiled. “Sounds just like you.”

Was he dogmatic? George asked himself as he drove home on switchbacks between trees, Bay views, and sky. Maybe, but only for good cause. Self-indulgent? Only sometimes, and at least he admitted to the fault. He should get some credit for that. Sexually repressed? No, easily bored. Misogynist? He took a hairpin turn. Hardly. He loved women!

George pulled off Buena Vista onto Wildwood, then parked halfway over the curb and collected his mail.
Edifice complex
hit close to home. George adored his house, and as Nick could attest, he had become obsessed with its restoration. He’d spent years and more money than he cared to admit. Still, even here, he pleaded innocent. Obsession, yes. Self-indulgence, no. The restoration was about Bernard Maybeck, not George Friedman. He was just a steward to Maybeck’s vision. The research he and his designers had done, the ceramic tile, the salvaged wood, the light fixtures, and the hardware had been a labor of love, not ego. He had been patient, looking for the perfect door hinges. He had allowed his shingles to weather naturally, enduring months when his Californian beauty looked like a molting bird, until at last the cedar darkened and his wisteria came into its own.

Walking under a wooden trellis built like a Shinto torii, he climbed two flights of winding outdoor stairs, past eucalyptus, oak, and pine. Tree house and temple, George’s home seemed bigger inside than outside. Tossing his mail onto a table, he switched on lights so that his great beamed living room glowed bloodred and deepest green and glinting gold. The fireplace was manorial. The square staircase turned and turned again in the entryway, and all the way up, George could view his framed collection of antique maps. Early novels filled his personal library, first editions of Austen, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett. American poets, almost all signed. He owned a copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s
The Harp-Weaver
inscribed to her lover George Dillon:
To my darling George
. A signed copy of Sandburg’s
The People, Yes
as well as Frost, Cummings, Ezra Pound. He collected first editions of dystopian satires:
Gulliver’s Travels, Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, Erewhon
. His dictionaries were magnificent, all English and American. First editions of
Webster’s
, first fascicles of the
OED
, and, most precious, a 1765
Dictionary of the English Language
that had belonged to Mrs. Thrale.

Oak tables displayed platoons of typewriters: downstrike typewriters, upstrike typewriters, vintage World War I typewriters, turn-of-the-century typewriters—a 1901 Armstrong, a Densmore 1, a brass 1881 Hamilton Automatic, even an 1877 Sholes & Glidden in its case—each perfect in its kind, primed and polished so the metal shone.

He scarcely glanced at any of these things, but he needed them nonetheless. The collections illustrated each of George’s interests in turn, from vintage machines, to poetry, to maps; just as fish give way to bears, and bears to beaked birds’ heads on carved totem poles. Some kept journals. Some raised children. George told his life history with objects. His boyish treasures and pirate games now took the form of Northwest explorers’ charts. His childhood superheroes metamorphosed into a complete run of Classic Comics, sealed in archival sleeves in the glass cabinets of his butler’s pantry. The gold evenings of his youth he stored up in Ridge, Heitz, and Grgich, his California wines.

In the kitchen he minced shallots with his good Japanese knife. He poured himself a glass of Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, and admired its deep almond hue. Liquid possibly too good for cooking, but he used it anyway, poaching the sole with shallots in the wine and butter. He set a place in the dining room, poured another glass of the Chard, and ate his dinner. He was nothing if not civilized.

And yet, he was dissatisfied. The fish tasted bland, the Chard too buttery. Over time, his appetites had changed. He had been young, of course, like everybody else. He had loved a girl and she had hurt him, as first girlfriends did, and he had recovered and avenged himself, more or less, on all the others—although he never considered his behavior vengeful. In his youth his desires had been simple: to drink, to smoke, to screw, and to hang out with his friends, none of whom were women. He inhaled women too quickly, devouring what he most admired: their salt-sweet taste, their arch and sway. In that experimental age—George’s teens and twenties, America’s seventies—he took what he wanted, running girls and nights together in a haze of pot and alcohol.

Death shook George. His younger sister overdosed, and he lost his taste for the so-called counterculture. As he approached thirty he took stock—considering the women he had seduced, the drugs he had abused—and a new desire consumed him: to live better, or at least less self-indulgently, to give more, to start a family. The resolutions were heartfelt, the results were mixed. He lived with one woman and then another, and willed himself to fall in love, but he did not, and so he grew more solitary, even as he hungered for companionship. He mourned that no one in the world was right for him, even as his girlfriends branded him an opportunist and a libertine. In the worst of these love-storms, he applied himself in penance to his dissertation, and finished in record time. He had no interest in academia and scarcely remembered why he’d begun studying thermal dynamics in the first place. Therefore, he took the job at Microsoft and drove north to Seattle, where he worked long days building Excel. Yearning for substance apart from his share price, which was always rising, inexorably rising, he began to read. Reading, he began to buy.